As the very first day of the new year 2016 begins to unfold its mysteries and presents its surprises in front of us, I am gazing at the crystal ball and taking a shot at unravelling the packed bundle of panoramic views, hues and phews that possibly lie ahead of us during this year....
I will attempt to look at certain key aspects that influence and impact today's GLOBAL CITIZEN spanning across areas such as World Affairs, International Economy & Business, Global Balance of Power, Science & Technology et al and their intertwining there of that shapes the daily lives of people across the globe…
1. DECLINE OF THE U.S: The year 2015 has been very significant in the fields of International Affairs and the associated “Power Equilibrium” in the modern world’s political arena in the sense that it is most definitively an INFLECTION POINT. 2015 undoubtedly signalled the “BEGINNING OF THE DECLINE” of the United States from its enviable position as the numero uno nation in the world. It's prestige has taken a toll not only by its extremely poor handling of the middle eastern crises post the Jasmine Revolution and the Arab Spring awakening, ineffective handling of the lurking dangers such as Syria, North Korea and of course the ISIS, weak showing on the Iranian Nuclear Agreement and its subsequent follow up and execution etc but also by allowing enough leeway for other nations to fill the vacuum created as a result of its inability to show leadership and statesmanship, absence of firmness in words and deeds, missing the exuberance and confidence that it had always exuded in its hey days. In my opinion this situation will only deteriorate further during the year 2016 with other power hungry countries eagerly waiting to take advantage of the situation and gain dominance on the global stage. And this has been only been further exacerbated by the rather average performance of the U.S on the business & economy, education, inequality gap, health, science and technology fronts.
2. WHO WILL BE THE NEXT “SUPER POWER”?: While the eyes of the entire world are on China with the heads of governments across the globe jostling to form friendships and alliances with this nation, I do not believe that China has the wherewithal or even the innate DNA of competencies or skills needed for attaining leadership on the global arena. Becoming a top economy on the globe is one thing and becoming a ‘SUPER POWER’ is yet another. The Chinese simply do not have it in them as to what it would take to become a “Global Statesman” and their narrowly focused approach on global policies accentuated by their being shrouded in secrecy and inability to bridge the trust deficit formed over years will simply not cut the ice. Amidst all this chaos and confusion there is a very good chance that Russia will go all out to fill in the vacuum in its desperate attempt to re-gain its historic high ground what was once a very pre-eminent one as the world’s super power. Russians have a thorough understanding of the world politics and also tons of experience in "DEAL MAKING" across myriad areas encompassing competencies as varied as diplomatic know-how, alliance and counter alliance formations, military supremacy, counter intelligence corps, strategically analysing and assessing information in real time, patience and perseverance to take short term hits to gain in the long term etc. After all they have “BEEN THERE AND DONE THAT" in the Cold War era. The direction and trends along these lines might become much more clear as the year 2016 unfolds in front of us…
3. THE GLOBAL ECONOMY: Unfortunately there might not be any major reprieve for the global economy even in the year 2016. The “WHIRLWIND” of “ECONOMIC RECESSION” which started in the U.S in the year 2007 later moved on to European shores in 2012 culminating in the Euro Zone crisis and causing unprecedented damage to the world economy in the last few years. If the seers of economics are to be believed then the “EYE OF THE STORM” will further move eastwards during 2016 causing a rout in the emerging economies dependent largely on exports and having under developed domestic markets such as China et al… In today's world characterised by an internecine network of complex webs and intricate inter-dependencies, irrespective of the location of the “EYE OF THE STORM”, the entire world will invariably be hit by the "STORM" though I do believe that the extent of damage would albeit vary from locale to locale…
4. ALGORITHM DRIVEN ECONOMY: Economics be it at the level of the wold or a nation or even at the level of an industry is about and only about SUPPLY and DEMAND. The whole field of macro as well as micro economics and the tomes of research done in this discipline finally boils down to just these 2 factors. What we are essentially saying is that the fluctuations in the economy at say a national levels is directly influenced by the fluctuations in the demand and supply for the myriad range of products and services that constitute the nations GDP. As a corollary if we can minimise the mismatches in the demand and supply to an absolute minima then the fluctuations in the macroeconomy will also be limited to a narrow range and the cyclical nature of the economy will be busted. This will involve a humongous amount of meticulous long term planning at a national level and collection or gathering of data at various stages of the product or service life cycle, the entire supply chain as well as a careful monitoring of consumption trends in the societal and national markets. However the pervasiveness or ubiquitousness of technologies such as SMAC, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and Robotics has the potential of making this a reality. We might see the initial adoption of these long term algorithm driven economic planning techniques by technology savvy nations during the year 2016.
5. ENERGY DRIVEN TECTONIC SHIFT IN GLOBAL POWER EQUILIBRIUM: 2016 will see an increased adoption of the electric automobile technology across the world. Consumers will start buying these vehicles in larger numbers as the eco-system needed for servicing, maintenance and re-charging of such vehicles gradually gets built up. This together with a substantial advancement in the battery power storage technologies will start to sound a death knell to the century old Internal Combustion engine industry. Put in the cheap and larger quantity of electric power available across the world as a result of the technological advancements in solar cells, solar panels and allied areas as well as the proliferation of nuclear power plants, the signal is all clear and the path is laid out for the success of electric car industry. Let's add SHALE OIL to the equation and lo and behold we see the bargaining power of the Oil and Petroleum exporting countries melt down instantaneously. One might have millions of gallons of Gasoline to export but there would simply be no buyers for it at any price. This will trigger tectonic shifts to the entire geo-political scene and economic as well as power equilibrium across the comity of world’s nations will be thoroughly rattled. This would have huge repercussions on military alliances, trade and commerce equations, swings in national GDPs and changing political and strategic alliances or partnerships amongst the leading nations. The year 2016 might as well make this tectonic shift apparent to the public at large...
6. THE SPACE RACE: The space scientists across the world have been celebrating the success of the recent SPACEX mission which is indeed a technological break through in the field of rocket science and engineering. The late 50s and the early 60s witnessed a space race of an unprecedented nature between the U.S and the Soviet Union with the balance tilted somewhat in favour of the Soviet Union. It took a man of great stature, none other than JFK himself to finally tilt the balance in favour of the U.S and laying the ground for the Apollo 11 Moon mission which catapulted the United States in to a high orbit with the competition simply left far behind. However in the recent times, the U.S has substantially lost its capabilities in this arena by voluntarily shutting down all the future projects of NASA and by and large getting its space strategy to a “sustain and maintain” mode with not much further research being done. Today Russia is the only nation in the world that has the capability of sending a man into space. And it is the U.S which is on the contrary funding the R&D efforts of Russia in this arena with the intent that we must keep the tacit knowledge and operational facilities for such a launch intact somewhere in the world, keeping global human interest in view. This picture sounds too altruistic to me and I believe that U.S should hedge its bets in the space research business by partnering and channelling the R&D monies to an ally like India which has remarkable capabilities in the space research field. With the first move being made by the signing of contract for launching of American satellites into space in 2016 by Indian Space Research Organisation ( ISRO ), I am sure we will see deepening of ties between India and U.S in this sphere of cutting edge technology. Keeping in view the fact that the rocket science technology is a dual use technology and can be used for developing very long distance Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) and Earth-Space-Earth re-entrant missiles fitted with nuclear war heads, U.S should tread carefully while choosing who its partners in this arena are. All things being said, it always makes great sense to trust and rely on the world's largest democracy.
7. THE TECHNOLOGY ADVANTAGE: The launch of the book titled ‘The Second Machine Age’ by Andrew McAfee of MIT Media Labs in early 2014 triggered off a series of debates, heated arguments and expression of opinions on a range of topics such as ‘Robots ruling over human beings’, ‘Computers replacing humans in their jobs’, ‘Ethical, Philosophical and Moral implications of various possibilities opened up by Artificial Intelligence’ and so on. The year 2015 has indeed witnessed what could be termed as a “CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION” in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The spate of progress in this field during this one year alone has astonished many AI experts and engineers as progress of this magnitude was simply unexpected. The incredible euphoria surrounding the pace of advancements in this field will continue in the year 2016 as well and we will witness computer systems and Robots doing things that were confined to science fiction till last year. Like all other technological revolutions that preceded it, the Digital revolution will certainly cause disruptions to the business models and the industry structures. Technologies like Big Data Analytics and Internet of Things (IoT) will cause huge shifts in the way the businesses are conducted in future. Similarly Artificial Intelligence will reduce the need to employ workers in the low-skill or low-education category as well as reduce the workforce in the middle management layer.
The interesting point to note however according to me is that Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and IoT are being made possible today primarily because of the cheaper and miniature versions of the electronic circuits available today thanks to the fact that more and more silicon transistors are packed tightly in one micron of space whose growth rate is defined popularly by what is known as Moore’s Law. Relying on incremental increase in computing speeds and lowering of computing costs in a predictable manner every year for the last several decades is not something that can be called as "DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION" or path breaking in the truest sense of the word. If one really looks at the computing world not much has really changed in terms of basic technology per-se from the time, Alan Turing cracked Enigma code during World War 2 using the computer based on Von Neumann architecture in 1940s to the IBM Mainframe with DB2 in the 1960s to the Big Data systems of today where the data base is only far more larger and fairly old and established statistical tools and techniques are applied on processed data. The IoT is in its most essential form is a miniaturisation of an A/D and D/A convertor Integrated Circuits that have been available for decades now. And yes the most talked about subject of Artificial Intelligence has not changed in a disruptive fashion from the days when Alan Turing presented his paper on ‘Turing Machine’ in the 1950s to the ‘Multi Level Perceptrons’ of the 1960s based on theoretical Mathematical techniques such as Sigmoid Activation Functions, Convolution Operations and Feed Forward Neural Networks et al which had good implementations of working Algorithms in place as early as in mid 1980s.
I will attempt to look at certain key aspects that influence and impact today's GLOBAL CITIZEN spanning across areas such as World Affairs, International Economy & Business, Global Balance of Power, Science & Technology et al and their intertwining there of that shapes the daily lives of people across the globe…
1. DECLINE OF THE U.S: The year 2015 has been very significant in the fields of International Affairs and the associated “Power Equilibrium” in the modern world’s political arena in the sense that it is most definitively an INFLECTION POINT. 2015 undoubtedly signalled the “BEGINNING OF THE DECLINE” of the United States from its enviable position as the numero uno nation in the world. It's prestige has taken a toll not only by its extremely poor handling of the middle eastern crises post the Jasmine Revolution and the Arab Spring awakening, ineffective handling of the lurking dangers such as Syria, North Korea and of course the ISIS, weak showing on the Iranian Nuclear Agreement and its subsequent follow up and execution etc but also by allowing enough leeway for other nations to fill the vacuum created as a result of its inability to show leadership and statesmanship, absence of firmness in words and deeds, missing the exuberance and confidence that it had always exuded in its hey days. In my opinion this situation will only deteriorate further during the year 2016 with other power hungry countries eagerly waiting to take advantage of the situation and gain dominance on the global stage. And this has been only been further exacerbated by the rather average performance of the U.S on the business & economy, education, inequality gap, health, science and technology fronts.
2. WHO WILL BE THE NEXT “SUPER POWER”?: While the eyes of the entire world are on China with the heads of governments across the globe jostling to form friendships and alliances with this nation, I do not believe that China has the wherewithal or even the innate DNA of competencies or skills needed for attaining leadership on the global arena. Becoming a top economy on the globe is one thing and becoming a ‘SUPER POWER’ is yet another. The Chinese simply do not have it in them as to what it would take to become a “Global Statesman” and their narrowly focused approach on global policies accentuated by their being shrouded in secrecy and inability to bridge the trust deficit formed over years will simply not cut the ice. Amidst all this chaos and confusion there is a very good chance that Russia will go all out to fill in the vacuum in its desperate attempt to re-gain its historic high ground what was once a very pre-eminent one as the world’s super power. Russians have a thorough understanding of the world politics and also tons of experience in "DEAL MAKING" across myriad areas encompassing competencies as varied as diplomatic know-how, alliance and counter alliance formations, military supremacy, counter intelligence corps, strategically analysing and assessing information in real time, patience and perseverance to take short term hits to gain in the long term etc. After all they have “BEEN THERE AND DONE THAT" in the Cold War era. The direction and trends along these lines might become much more clear as the year 2016 unfolds in front of us…
3. THE GLOBAL ECONOMY: Unfortunately there might not be any major reprieve for the global economy even in the year 2016. The “WHIRLWIND” of “ECONOMIC RECESSION” which started in the U.S in the year 2007 later moved on to European shores in 2012 culminating in the Euro Zone crisis and causing unprecedented damage to the world economy in the last few years. If the seers of economics are to be believed then the “EYE OF THE STORM” will further move eastwards during 2016 causing a rout in the emerging economies dependent largely on exports and having under developed domestic markets such as China et al… In today's world characterised by an internecine network of complex webs and intricate inter-dependencies, irrespective of the location of the “EYE OF THE STORM”, the entire world will invariably be hit by the "STORM" though I do believe that the extent of damage would albeit vary from locale to locale…
4. ALGORITHM DRIVEN ECONOMY: Economics be it at the level of the wold or a nation or even at the level of an industry is about and only about SUPPLY and DEMAND. The whole field of macro as well as micro economics and the tomes of research done in this discipline finally boils down to just these 2 factors. What we are essentially saying is that the fluctuations in the economy at say a national levels is directly influenced by the fluctuations in the demand and supply for the myriad range of products and services that constitute the nations GDP. As a corollary if we can minimise the mismatches in the demand and supply to an absolute minima then the fluctuations in the macroeconomy will also be limited to a narrow range and the cyclical nature of the economy will be busted. This will involve a humongous amount of meticulous long term planning at a national level and collection or gathering of data at various stages of the product or service life cycle, the entire supply chain as well as a careful monitoring of consumption trends in the societal and national markets. However the pervasiveness or ubiquitousness of technologies such as SMAC, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and Robotics has the potential of making this a reality. We might see the initial adoption of these long term algorithm driven economic planning techniques by technology savvy nations during the year 2016.
5. ENERGY DRIVEN TECTONIC SHIFT IN GLOBAL POWER EQUILIBRIUM: 2016 will see an increased adoption of the electric automobile technology across the world. Consumers will start buying these vehicles in larger numbers as the eco-system needed for servicing, maintenance and re-charging of such vehicles gradually gets built up. This together with a substantial advancement in the battery power storage technologies will start to sound a death knell to the century old Internal Combustion engine industry. Put in the cheap and larger quantity of electric power available across the world as a result of the technological advancements in solar cells, solar panels and allied areas as well as the proliferation of nuclear power plants, the signal is all clear and the path is laid out for the success of electric car industry. Let's add SHALE OIL to the equation and lo and behold we see the bargaining power of the Oil and Petroleum exporting countries melt down instantaneously. One might have millions of gallons of Gasoline to export but there would simply be no buyers for it at any price. This will trigger tectonic shifts to the entire geo-political scene and economic as well as power equilibrium across the comity of world’s nations will be thoroughly rattled. This would have huge repercussions on military alliances, trade and commerce equations, swings in national GDPs and changing political and strategic alliances or partnerships amongst the leading nations. The year 2016 might as well make this tectonic shift apparent to the public at large...
6. THE SPACE RACE: The space scientists across the world have been celebrating the success of the recent SPACEX mission which is indeed a technological break through in the field of rocket science and engineering. The late 50s and the early 60s witnessed a space race of an unprecedented nature between the U.S and the Soviet Union with the balance tilted somewhat in favour of the Soviet Union. It took a man of great stature, none other than JFK himself to finally tilt the balance in favour of the U.S and laying the ground for the Apollo 11 Moon mission which catapulted the United States in to a high orbit with the competition simply left far behind. However in the recent times, the U.S has substantially lost its capabilities in this arena by voluntarily shutting down all the future projects of NASA and by and large getting its space strategy to a “sustain and maintain” mode with not much further research being done. Today Russia is the only nation in the world that has the capability of sending a man into space. And it is the U.S which is on the contrary funding the R&D efforts of Russia in this arena with the intent that we must keep the tacit knowledge and operational facilities for such a launch intact somewhere in the world, keeping global human interest in view. This picture sounds too altruistic to me and I believe that U.S should hedge its bets in the space research business by partnering and channelling the R&D monies to an ally like India which has remarkable capabilities in the space research field. With the first move being made by the signing of contract for launching of American satellites into space in 2016 by Indian Space Research Organisation ( ISRO ), I am sure we will see deepening of ties between India and U.S in this sphere of cutting edge technology. Keeping in view the fact that the rocket science technology is a dual use technology and can be used for developing very long distance Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) and Earth-Space-Earth re-entrant missiles fitted with nuclear war heads, U.S should tread carefully while choosing who its partners in this arena are. All things being said, it always makes great sense to trust and rely on the world's largest democracy.
7. THE TECHNOLOGY ADVANTAGE: The launch of the book titled ‘The Second Machine Age’ by Andrew McAfee of MIT Media Labs in early 2014 triggered off a series of debates, heated arguments and expression of opinions on a range of topics such as ‘Robots ruling over human beings’, ‘Computers replacing humans in their jobs’, ‘Ethical, Philosophical and Moral implications of various possibilities opened up by Artificial Intelligence’ and so on. The year 2015 has indeed witnessed what could be termed as a “CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION” in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The spate of progress in this field during this one year alone has astonished many AI experts and engineers as progress of this magnitude was simply unexpected. The incredible euphoria surrounding the pace of advancements in this field will continue in the year 2016 as well and we will witness computer systems and Robots doing things that were confined to science fiction till last year. Like all other technological revolutions that preceded it, the Digital revolution will certainly cause disruptions to the business models and the industry structures. Technologies like Big Data Analytics and Internet of Things (IoT) will cause huge shifts in the way the businesses are conducted in future. Similarly Artificial Intelligence will reduce the need to employ workers in the low-skill or low-education category as well as reduce the workforce in the middle management layer.
The interesting point to note however according to me is that Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and IoT are being made possible today primarily because of the cheaper and miniature versions of the electronic circuits available today thanks to the fact that more and more silicon transistors are packed tightly in one micron of space whose growth rate is defined popularly by what is known as Moore’s Law. Relying on incremental increase in computing speeds and lowering of computing costs in a predictable manner every year for the last several decades is not something that can be called as "DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION" or path breaking in the truest sense of the word. If one really looks at the computing world not much has really changed in terms of basic technology per-se from the time, Alan Turing cracked Enigma code during World War 2 using the computer based on Von Neumann architecture in 1940s to the IBM Mainframe with DB2 in the 1960s to the Big Data systems of today where the data base is only far more larger and fairly old and established statistical tools and techniques are applied on processed data. The IoT is in its most essential form is a miniaturisation of an A/D and D/A convertor Integrated Circuits that have been available for decades now. And yes the most talked about subject of Artificial Intelligence has not changed in a disruptive fashion from the days when Alan Turing presented his paper on ‘Turing Machine’ in the 1950s to the ‘Multi Level Perceptrons’ of the 1960s based on theoretical Mathematical techniques such as Sigmoid Activation Functions, Convolution Operations and Feed Forward Neural Networks et al which had good implementations of working Algorithms in place as early as in mid 1980s.
In a nut shell the lack of a fundamental disruption on the technological front will never be able to create a fundamental disruption to the business systems or macro-economies in the long run.
"This is an ephemeral phase in the history of technological innovation and like all those that preceded it, this too shall pass by..."
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author purely in his personal capacity and have nothing to do with the company he works for...
No comments:
Post a Comment